I’m somewhat bumblingly collecting posts about the Clarion experience here http://lizargall.com/2009/03/clarion-blogs/ and have linked to you.

Best wishes

Liz

“spiritually uplifting” (up-ward spir-aling) short text, meant to be read over & over:

record a shortstory as mp3, and loop listen

are there any “branching children’s books” that are semiclosed-paths (wreaths, toroidal) instead of basically linear accelerators?

( skip ‘ahead’ to page number nine if want to take both the red & the blue paths )

i imagine that a style of metaphoric ambitextuality would evolve, as one wrote, or read, such a revolver-go-round.

“ergroundergroundergroUnd”

Aroundabout in Underland?
“Begin in the middle and go on till you get back to where you started: then go round again.”

( now, please mentally connect any two words from column A & column B, then continue reading )

burroughs and cage would say shuffle-listen to fragmented parts.
but a linear story could be designed as a slingshot. or not.

james joyce’s riverrun is certainly …

their definition:

“Tropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.”

all quite useful as algosystems for running infinitely-recursive massively-multiple parallel worldsystems on a superdupercomputer network of networks of networlds, yes?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotHoles

Reading it made me think of Hylozoic. On page 22 Ebenezer as an old man remembers
when as young boy he inherits from a relative who had passed away,
the two decorative china dogs he still has,
“I like my two china dogs. When I write down anything wicked,
one of them look very serious; but the other one, he wink.”

Probably the earlier chapters get revised more often.

While I’m working on a novel, every now and then I’ll print out what I have so far and revise it from the start, just to keep my story threads straight. Even though I have an outline, the outline changes, and I’m often going back and changing things in the earlier chapters, and it takes a close re-read to make sure it’s all straight.

To give the later chapters more attention, I don’t always reprint from the start, like I might just print out the chunk from chap 6 to 10.

When it’s all done I give it another revision, send it off, then usually do another. And there are opportunities for less extensive revisions in the copyediting and (slightly) in proofing stages as well.

Also, I’m finding that there’s a lot more slop in my novel than there’s been in my short fiction. I’m just now becoming aware of the amount of material I’ve got on the page that the reader just doesn’t need. Do you have any advice for discerning what needs to be on the page from what just came out during the writing process?